I'm a board game obsessive. Even though I publicly plead guilty to still buying some games simply because they are beautiful, I've become increasingly ruthless when deciding which games are good and which aren't. Opening the box and having that first encounter with the components is a genuine moment of joy. What can I tell you?... The next step is inspecting the methods and materials that are supposed to teach me how to play.
Lately, some games have even been packaged in a particular way to guide you through your first play. Root, Oath... Others offer several ways to approach learning: you can read the rules, or you can follow a guided game included in the rulebook or provided as a separate booklet. A few GMT Games titles come to mind. Then there are games that include a booklet that is some mixture of onboarding, tutorial and rules. That last approach has to be extremely well executed, or it risks ending up halfway between everything (and nothing).
Whatever model the designers have chosen, I've reached a point where I can dismiss a game because of its introductory text. That doesn't mean I'll throw it away, but it does mean it goes onto the shelf and may take a very long time to come back down again. (Which is why my shelves are full of games I never play, but this is not the place to discuss my marital problems.) If the very first text doesn't make it clear what the objective is, how you win and how you lose, we're already off to a bad start. Some games begin by presenting the narrative. I can accept that and, in some cases, I enjoy it. But for me, failing to understand what I'm supposed to do is much more damaging than lacking narrative context. The reason is simple: if the proposed setting or theme didn't interest me, that game would never have made it into my home in the first place.
Once we've established what is expected of us and the context in which everything is going to happen, it's time to learn how to play. And not just superficially. You need to understand the game well enough to explain it to the people you've persuaded to spend some time together playing it. The older I get, the more I find myself moving away from complex games. I'm afraid the adoption cost might not be justified by the amount of fun I get back... and that would be a terrible deal. A game has to convince me that learning it is worth the effort.
The two ideal extremes would be zero adoption cost and an extraordinary promise of fun. Neither exists in practice... but a game wins me over by finding the right balance between those two factors. An excellent game would have a very high "promise of fun : adoption cost" ratio. That sweet spot is what interests me both as a player and as a designer.
It is absolutely crucial to convince players that the adoption cost will be worth "paying". Yes, games need carefully designed onboarding, and indie games even more so.
And that's the end of this little piece of self-help writing, in which I'm trying to convince myself that spending hours building a tutorial/onboarding flow that touches almost the entire surface of the codebase and interrupts the game's loops everywhere is, ultimately, for a good cause.
Vice Sallés